Part 1 — Prejudices of Philosophers

The first section opens with "the will to truth" and immediately asks the question the tradition has suppressed: why do we want truth in the first place? Why not untruth, uncertainty, ignorance? The desire for truth is not self-evident, Nietzsche argues — it is a value with a history, a drive with a psychology. Every metaphysical system, however logical in its architecture, reveals on inspection what its author most needed to believe. Plato needed the Forms because he needed permanence against the flux. Kant needed the thing-in-itself because he needed a limit to knowledge that would leave room for faith.

Section 4 is the book's most radical early move: "The falseness of an opinion is not for us an objection to it." The question is how far an opinion is "life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-rearing." This is not relativism; it is a different epistemology — one that evaluates beliefs not by their correspondence to a mind-independent world but by their role in the life of the thinker who holds them. Section 9 on the Stoics is brief and devastating: they wanted to live "according to nature" and then prescribed for nature what they themselves approved of. Every philosophy is, in this sense, a tyranny over nature dressed as a description of it.

The section on causa sui (§21) is among the finest in the book. Moral accountability — the kind that grounds punishment and praise — requires that a person be the cause of himself, that his will be the originating source of his actions uncaused by anything prior. This, Nietzsche says, is the best self-contradiction yet conceived: to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one's own bootstraps. The whole of the free will debate in philosophy has been a prolonged evasion of this absurdity. Part 1 ends having done its work: the reader who has followed it carefully cannot look at a philosophical system quite the same way again.